Evan Hunter - Me and Mr. Stenner

“Why’d you go with her?” I asked Mr. Stenner.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“If Mommy went down there to divorce Daddy, why didn’t he go with her? He was the one who married her in the first place, wasn’t he? So he should have been the one to go get the divorce with her.”

My mother’s wineglass hesitated on the way to her lips. She told me later that she’d thought the exact same thing coming home on the plane, and had suddenly buried her head in Mr. Stenner’s shoulder and begun crying. She hadn’t told him why she was crying. She hadn’t said she considered it somehow barbaric to divorce a man without him being there to hear those final words spoken — the way he’d heard the marriage words spoken before an assemblage of witnesses more than thirteen years before.

The wineglass hesitated on the way to her lips, and Mom sipped at the wine thoughtfully, and then turned to me and said, “Daddy signed a power of attorney. He didn’t have to be there.”

“Neither did Mr. Stenner,” I said flatly.

Whenever a kid from school was visiting, I used to introduce Mr. Stenner as my stepfather, even though he wasn’t yet. I think I was embarrassed about Mom and him living together without being married.

I’d say, “This is my stepfather,” and they’d say, “Hi.”

Simple as that.

But not so simple.

I didn’t want him to be my stepfather.

I used to take my mother aside and casually say, “Are you really going to marry him?”

“Yes,” she would say. She was having a lot of trouble right then with a lawyer named Arthur Randolph Knowles, who was Mr. Stenner’s attorney. He had, in fact, been Mr. Stenner’s attorney for years, and had insisted that his firm handle the divorce, even though there were no divorce specialists in his office. At least, that’s what Mom said. The only time she and Mr. Stenner came close to having an argument, in fact, was when they were discussing Arthur Randolph Knowles.

It seemed to me, though, that he wanted exactly the same thing I wanted. He wanted Mr. Stenner to go back to his wife and children, and the hell with Mommy and me. But even if there was nothing I d have liked better than for Mr. Stenner to have shaken hands with Mom and sailed off into the sunset, I still didn’t like Arthur Randolph Knowles. He was a pompous little man who always stood in front of the fireplace with his hands on his little potbelly, toasting his backside. Every time he opened his mouth, I expected dusty butterflies to come out. He always talked about the divorce in front of me, probably because he was one of those people who thought children didn’t exist. This is what he sounded like:

“As you know, Peter, the present status of your marital problem is that you have reduced Joan’s support payments, and have cut off all her charge accounts, credit cards, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Et cetera, et cetera” is precisely what Arthur Randolph Knowles used to say. Joan, by the way, was Mr. Stenner’s wife. Whenever they talked about her, I tried to remember what she looked like. I recalled a blue-eyed woman with dark brown hair. Once, when I was visiting Dad on a weekend, he pointed a woman out to me and said, “There’s Mrs. Stenner,” but she was getting into an automobile, and I didn’t get a good look at her.

“I am sure,” Mr. Knowles said, “that Joan must be bitterly unhappy with the present arrangement, which is so financially favorable to you, Peter, and so the next move is up to her and her lawyer.”

“Arthur,” Mr. Stenner said, “all I want to know is what options are open to us, that’s all. That’s why I asked you to come here tonight. Lillith and I...”

“Yes, I quite understand.”

“That’s what we’d like to know.”

“Yes. I’m coming to that, Peter. Patience, m’boy.”

Every time he said “Patience, m’boy,” Mom winced.

“Because it’s been almost seven months now, and there’s no sign...”

“What would you like, Peter? Would you like Joan to sue for divorce? I assure you there are grounds freely available to her,” Mr. Knowles said, and began ticking off the grounds on his fingers. “Abandonment, infidelity, failure to provide adequately for her support, et cetera, et cetera. But do you really want her to sue for divorce?”

“Arthur, you’re the lawyer, why are you asking me for advice?” Mr. Stenner said.

“The question was rhetorical,” Mr. Knowles said, “and the answer is ‘Of course not!’ Were she to sue for divorce, she would make immediate application for temporary alimony and counsel fees in substantial amounts. Moreover, were she even to sue for a legal separation...”

He went on and on, lawyers really are full of it. The gist of what he said each and every time was that without the cooperation of Mr. Stenner s wife, it was of course enormously difficult to obtain an equitable separation agreement. Mrs. Stenner did not want a divorce. Therefore...

Arthur Randolph Knowles shrugged, and smiled, and looked at my mother. The smile seemed to be advising her to forget the entire matter, let the man go back to his wife and children, eh? Then Mr. Knowles turned to Mr. Stenner and said, “As I’ve told you many times, Peter, marital problems of this sort can be most time-consuming, but in the long run, we always find a way to work them out, one way or the other. I strongly counsel your patience and forbearance. This too shall pass.”

Later that night, after Mr. Knowles had left, Mom said, “I despise the way that man expresses himself. Why does he always use language that sounds so medieval?”

“Bitterly unhappy,” Mr. Stenner quoted.

“Patience and forbearance.”

“This too shall pass.”

There was more snow in February and March than I could remember seeing ever in my life. Snow meant clogged roads. Clogged roads meant Dad having trouble picking me up on weekends. I was always waiting for something, it seemed. Waiting for Dad to come get me, or waiting for the divorce, or the wedding, or something, I don’t know what. Something terribly dramatic, I guess. A knock at the door. A lightning bolt zigzagging through the window and hitting the portrait of the cavalry officer. Anything. In the meantime, the three of us moved through that house like actors who’d already spoken our lines and gone to where we were supposed to go onstage, and were — well, waiting.

Just waiting.

I didn’t want Mr. Stenner to get his divorce, I didn’t want him and Mom to get married, and yet I did. I hated him, you see. But I also liked him a lot. He was a very comical man. And noisy. God, was he noisy. Once he had to go to Philadelphia to take some pictures there for a magazine, and he was gone only overnight, but I remember going into the living room where Mom was reading and saying to her, “Boy, it’s quiet around here.”

He was always making noise, if you know what I mean.

If a song he liked started playing on the radio, he’d just sing along with it at the top of his lungs. He had the world’s worst voice, he sang off key. I’d say, “That’s not the way it goes, Mr. Stenner,” and he’d say, “Quiet, Abby, that’s the way it goes.” And I’d try to teach him the right tune and he’d listen and then try to repeat it and get it all wrong again, a true tin ear, worse than Mom’s, which was also pretty tinny. Or he’d start dancing in what he considered rock style, shaking his fanny around the living room and wagging his hands in the air. A song would come on, and he’d just jump up off the couch and start dancing to beat the band! He wasn’t showing off or anything, he’d do it even if he was alone in the room, you’d suddenly feel the walls shaking, you knew Mr. Stenner was in there dancing all by himself, shaking his behind and wagging his hands.